Cohen: So, in relation to this whole notion of third tier, I’d like to try to describe some of the qualities of what I understand third tier to be about, based on my own experience and inquiry.

An individual who reached third tier would be someone who had a fairly good grasp and awareness of the individual and collective developmental structures that make up the self. Because he or she had developed through second tier, there would be a deep sense of how the fact that humanity has evolved through these structures over a very long period of time has made it possible for us to begin to interpret our experience in such extraordinary ways. I’m talking about an understanding that is more than just cognitive—there is almost a precognitive knowing of the fact that a conditioned self is an evolving self.

Such an individual would also have experienced a deep awakening to the primordial empty ground of all being. He or she would be conscious of an ultimate context that transcended time and form and therefore would have a deep intuitive knowing of freedom from form, from creation, from manifestation—a knowing that I am already free from this process. That is what, in a very fundamental way, liberates the self-sense from being trapped in the life process. But what distinguishes third tier, as I understand it, is that the individual has simultaneously awakened to the evolutionary impulse or authentic self, to Eros, and therefore has discovered an ecstatic and passionate sense of care for the future of that process.

This is how I would define a Kosmocentric orientation: when the individual realizes that as the authentic self, he or she is not separate from the energy and intelligence that initiated the creative process. In this orientation, the recognition that there is only One means I am and always have been that One, and therefore the responsibility to create the future is on my shoulders alone. When we embrace this Kosmocentric orientation, we realize that I’m not here merely to live my own life. I’m not even really here for my own personal liberation. I’m here to create the future. Indeed, I find my own liberation as an incarnate sentient being through giving myself to that unimaginable task.

One of the signs that such an individual had really reached this point in their own development would be that their relationship to their own inner personal experience, and the actions they would be taking in life—the way they would be choosing to live their life and what their life would be devoted to—would undeniably express the fact that there had been a profound transformation at the core of their being. Now their personal responses to life would begin to reflect the awakening of a higher moral, ethical, philosophical, and spiritual orientation over anything that was personal or cultural or even ethnically driven. This higher and deeper perspective would begin to inform, pre-thought, the way the liberated self or personality would be responding to inner and outer life. In other words, such an individual would really be a very different kind of human being because their self would be expressing the liberated, committed passion of the evolutionary impulse.

Wilber: Okay. Well, I think that’s great. In general, I think it’s right on the money. Let me say a few almost simplistic things to kind of orient it, and then we can just talk about it free form. What we’re really talking about, most fundamentally, is that because evolution has become aware of itself, because we actually understand growth and development now, we can see that we do have to awaken our own fundamental potentials, and part of that means awakening capacities to push into potentials that have not yet been created.

Incidentally, Clare Graves and Spiral Dynamics don’t talk about third tier like this.

Cohen: They don’t really talk about third tier at all, do they?

Wilber: No, the highest stage they mention is coral. But I think they would see coral as still part of second tier. Clare Graves believed that there would be six stages laid down in second tier, as there are in first tier, but I just don’t think it works like that—I don’t think it’s nearly as neat. What is starting to be seen in empirical research, for example in the work of Susanne Cook-Greuter, at the level that I call indigo and what Spiral Dynamics calls coral, is the emerging sense of a transpersonal witness as the individual identity, a sense of I AM-ness. And there is a realization that the world truly is a co-construction, not in the postmodern sense but in the sense of recognizing that the individual’s power of intentionality is part of that which co-creates the universe.

So the easiest way to talk about third tier is to say that it’s transpersonal. People don’t just think that the planet is a single organism with one consciousness; they start to say, “I am that.” At second tier, that’s still a conceptual identity. They think of themselves as part of all sentient beings and not just part of all humans, but it’s still not a felt identity; it’s a thought identity. Even if second tier has a cognitive understanding of a Kosmocentric perspective, and can indeed embody it to some degree, the actual sense of identity in second tier is still personal. Another way to put it is that second tier, turquoise, is the highest of the personal levels. And then, once you step into third tier, kaboom—you’re stepping into the transpersonal. And at that level, as you said, there is an assumed responsibility for this evolutionary impulse. It’s as if people live Eros.

Cohen: Exactly.

Wilber: It becomes the core of their being. It’s why they get up. When people get into second tier or higher, they feel already full, and they act out of superabundance. So there’s a sense of overflowing to it, in addition to a necessity to create out of an almost ethical or moral view. And then I think the description you gave is one very good version of some of the stuff that goes on there. And of course, a lot of what goes on there is still being laid down.

Cohen: Right. Of course.

Wilber: Another definition of third tier is that it’s the level at which you start to permanently realize the major states of consciousness, and it just so happens that the three major stages in third tier are ones that, of necessity, objectify the subtle, then causal, then nondual states. Second-tier stages are about the highest stage structures you can get to without necessarily having some sort of state realization. And you see this a lot—people who are at an integral stage of development but don’t have a state awakening. And so one of the things that becomes really important is that in order to move into third tier and true transpersonal structures, you have to have some sort of state training and state realization to allow wakefulness, which starts out confined to the waking state, to be able to move into subtle states of consciousness and not lose track of its own I AM-ness, or its own ground. Sometimes that actually includes lucid dreaming, or it may not. But it always includes being able to objectify the subtle, to transcend and include it, to make that subject and object.

Cohen: Right.

Wilber: And then also to move into causal where there’s just a permanent, ever-present witnessing. And so we have to make careful distinctions here, because you can have people who are just at green who have done a lot of state training and have a certain Big Mind awakening whereas you can have people at turquoise who don’t. But when you get into third tier, it comes with the territory. I use Aurobindo’s term “Supermind” to describe the highest structure in third tier, the end limit of vertical growth. And the end limit of horizontal or state growth I call Big Mind. Supermind includes Big Mind, but Big Mind does not include Supermind. That’s an important point. So third tier is where you really do have to start consciously making the ground of all being part of your being.

Cohen: One of the ways that I look for the evidence for what you were just describing is that the individual would begin to respond in a way that showed that their egoic or narcissistic conditioned responses were being contained within this higher perspective to such a degree that they are obviously a transformed man or woman. To put it in the simplest terms, it would mean that they had authentically transcended our highly developed postmodern narcissistic ego to a profound degree. They are not necessarily a perfectly liberated self, and I don’t even know if such a thing actually exists. But they have crossed what I call the fifty-one-percent threshold, which means that the evolutionary impulse—the authentic self and its Kosmocentric orientation—has become the dominant part of the self, which makes all the difference.

Wilber: I think that’s a good definition of what happens when you shift from turquoise into indigo, when you shift from second to third tier. That fifty-one percent just comes with the territory. And if it’s forty-nine percent, you’re still turquoise, even though there may be other things happening that are important as well.

Cohen: Sure. Now the reason, as I was saying, I think this really is the kind of attainment that is essential right now is that, at least in terms of my own understanding, when one begins to reach this third-tier level of development, the urge to create the future supersedes or becomes a stronger impulse than merely the impulse to liberate the self or to transcend the world. At that point, we realize that we need to work with other individuals in order to create this future because we can’t do it alone. And it’s hard to work together with others, especially when we’re getting into the kind of delicate and subtle territory that’s necessary in order to take these next steps together. It becomes apparent that the only way human beings will actually be able to work together to authentically create a future that expresses a truly Kosmocentric perspective is if the individuals have actually reached this third-tier level of development themselves. Because what happens when we reach this level is that our capacity to create becomes truly chaordic—which means we are willing to live in a context of chaos that, unless there was a little bit of enlightenment, would be personally unbearable. And we can do so without losing our center of gravity so that new and higher expressions of order can arise out of the chaos—again and again and again.

Wilber: Indeed.

Cohen: That would really seem to be the task at hand for the collective of individuals at the leading edge who have realized that the only reason they are here is to create the future. Actually, it would be essential that they reach nothing less than this third-tier level of development to be able to work together and create a context that could be an expression of what Ken Wilber would call superintegral.

Wilber: Amen, brother!

Cohen: Because otherwise we’d be able to talk about it, we’d be able to be inspired by the idea, but we wouldn’t actually be able to pull it off. And as far as I understand it, the task at hand for those of us at the leading edge is to actually be able to pull this off together. I personally think that the only way anyone will believe you or believe me or believe us is by seeing objective evidence that this is really happening, that this is working. That’s going to be the ultimate proof.

Wilber: Indeed. And we need to provide leadership in these ways of togetherness that are going to work. Because pluralistic togetherness just doesn’t work; it’s a mess for our day and age. We need higher types of leadership on this type of togetherness. In terms of being responsible for our own growth and development, the first important thing is to realize that there is a second tier, an integral stage of growth, and that’s really where, in a sense, the largest leading edge is. But then the leading edge of the leading edge is third tier, where we are actually starting to embody that potential in ways that consciousness necessarily awakens.

We have to remember that what’s really important on a large scale right now is for people to get into second tier. The green level of development, which includes the fifty-five million Americans often called cultural creatives, is the leading edge for the mainstream, and about a third of them are ready to transform to second tier. That in itself is going to be staggeringly huge. But it’s the pioneers who help define what second tier is. And that’s third tier.